


Consider This Popsicle Stand Blown

by cicadabug, circopoi (cicadabug), Danlabs



Category: OMORI (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, POV Aubrey, POV Sunny, Post-Canon, Runaway Aubrey, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29380125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicadabug/pseuds/cicadabug, https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicadabug/pseuds/circopoi, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Danlabs/pseuds/Danlabs
Summary: Yeah, it's about time Aubrey runs away. She hitches a ride with Sunny, you know, as the practical thing to do. "Live freely and without waste," she says--the raccoon-girl that she is. Leave the town, leave this life, leave the stupid boy who killed the love of her life and turned her to making trouble for love and its analogues. Only that last part is... let's just say it's not going too well.Takes place after the events of OMORI's good ending.
Relationships: Aubrey/Sunny (OMORI)
Comments: 157
Kudos: 281





	1. The Fox and the Tiger

**Author's Note:**

> ayuh its me cicada dropping a COLLAB with danlabs (who doesnt have an ao3) -- look this fic is getting real long and i dont know what to do about it. please enjoy. gimme comments please i have no idea what im doing im just sharting out words at a hundred miles a minute. im at cicada#5279 if you wanna holler at me or be my friend. 
> 
> i got most of the first bit written already and im gonna update it.... .hnngh .. . . .. every day? two days?

A few days after he was released from the hospital, he finds her sitting on the curb in front of her house, eyes full of glass shards just like when he first found her here all those years ago, tearing out the grass by its roots and tossing it in front of her feet. The sunset blazes tongues of opalescent fire across her pink hair--perhaps too much. Oil gathers on the roots, unwashed and uncombed. She could have just come from an all-nighter party if it weren’t for the bloodlessness in her cheeks and the blatant lack of parties in this dead-end town. She hides the undersides of her arms and gives him a wan smile as he walks past. 

Not being flinched at, or side-eyed, makes Sunny feel a twisting weakness in his gut that isn’t entirely unpleasant. He hurries forward. She doesn’t want to see him, doesn’t want to talk to him, only wants to watch and mutter and publicly bless him and privately condone him to hell like everyone else in this neighbourhood full of eyes and teeth. But at least he’s not Basil, who gets the brunt of it. At least he’s got somewhere to go after this.

Her knees poke out, akimbo, as sharp as thorns, dirty band-aids with cartoon characters plastered on the twin missile silos of her calves. “Hey,” she calls out.

Sunny stops. He can’t outrun her; his legs have atrophied with years of bedrest. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” she says. “Sit with me.” 

Sunny says nothing but his heart begins to beat. 

She scrapes the bottom of a sneaker against fallen leaves. “C’mon, I don’t bite.” A quiver of buried desperation flutters through her words. “Sorry I didn’t come see you. How’s Basil?”

He turns around. Across the sky, sparrows divebomb summer insects. He looks at them instead of her filthy fire-opal brilliance--having one eye to see with makes everything a lot brighter. Sunny clears his throat and adjusts his collar. “He’s fine. He’s, uh. He’s okay.” 

“Glad to hear it,” she says, vacantly. She talks about how no one talks in Faraway Town, how the teen-show TV-stars talk, with a chirping upward lilt at the end of her sentences and a dry cynicism in her words. “God, your voice is so deep now.”

“Sorry.” 

“No, dummy. It was a compliment. Are you busy?”

“No, not really.” There’s nothing to do at home besides sleep and go about his daily business routing his path to avoid his mother.

“I’m free too. Let’s go get a goddamn Slurpee or some shit. They got a new flavor in the machine.” 

And the wind blows, and there is so much unsaid that bounces between them, electric and uncontrollable, arcing and sparking, across centuries and light-years. It rustles through rows of suburban trees; they toss their heads in submission and tithe their loosest, dried leaves to this swift northern levite. It blows past Aubrey, lifting her hair from her lime green eyes; it blows past Sunny, carrying scents of artificial strawberry and human residue. 

“C’mere, help me up.” She reaches out with both hands and gestures to be picked up, the way she did with Hero when she was little and portable.

And it’s like Sunny has fallen through ice into the rolling, undisturbed undercarriage of a frozen lake, where eels hibernate beneath the mud and the only contact with the world above is the muffled dream-echo footsteps of those that walk upon the surface. Because the remembrance of it all, it still hurts. When she was a tiny brunette, the only way to tell between her and his sister from behind was by their height difference. They even used the same shampoo.

Whatever shallow breath there was in his body evaporates. Try as he might to move, his limbs are encased with a cocoon of frost.

Aubrey glances at his stiffness, sighs, and helps herself up, dusting off her shorts. “Everything alright?”

He shakes his head. It’s a balmy evening, but the wind chill prickles his skin. 

“I didn’t think so,” she says, with a sloppy tilt of her head. “We going or not?”

She kicks a rock in the direction of the Othermart. “You know…”

“What?”

“You have a really nice voice. Pity you don’t talk more.” 

Sunny feels his vocal cords swell and close up. By the way Aubrey smiles at him, he can tell she means it, in her own sad, desolate way. He looks away quickly and tries very hard not to think about every other time she’s smiled for him like that. 

She skips forward, playing hopscotch on an invisible sidewalk grid as if nothing has ever happened between the two of them. Fairy-like, if she didn’t pause to hock a lob of spit into the ground every few minutes. Sunny follows behind her, hands in his pockets. They might be twelve again, heading to the Othermart for Sunny’s orange chocolate truffle and Aubrey’s strawberry gummy bears with pocket change in their little fists. Back when the sun before them was a blink younger--but the two of them were never alone like this. 

In the hospital room, Aubrey had stared, risen to her feet, and stalked out of the room, eyes holding a microcosm of nothing. Kel had laughed, then, seeing his brother’s face pale, started to cry, bit by bit. Hero had gripped onto the rail of Basil’s bed with white knuckles and hushed him before throwing up mid-sentence himself. And they left, leaving him with Basil. 

“It’s okay. You did good.” Basil had smiled at him, and for once, his eyes, though teary and bruised, never flitted behind Sunny. He had reached out, and Sunny had taken his hand. “Everything is going to be okay.” 

And then they were gone, and Sunny weathered the rest of his stay contemplating the flowers slowly wilting in his hospital room, from people who no doubt now reconsidered giving them to him. 

He decided he enjoyed hospital stays, loved the whiteness of it, the way time lost all meaning in its homogenous halls. For a single endless moment, he was safe. 

He feels it now, the sensation of time stretching onward and lengthening like saltwater taffy. The streets empty around him and cones of yellow light gradually replace the waning sun. Aubrey hums some pop song she heard on the radio off-key, a little too loudly to be convincingly comfortable. Her shoes are untied. 

When they reach the fluorescent glow of the Othermart, Aubrey’s back straightens just a little; she stops skipping and starts striding the moment the automatic doors open for her. She weighs a handful of coins in her jacket pocket. “I think I got enough to spot you,” she says. “If you don’t have cash.” 

They’re aware of eyes on them: the murderer and the delinquent. The cashier with “Fred” on his nameplate no longer smiles at Sunny as he walks past. 

Aubrey drags him forward by the sleeve. “You’ll get used to it,” she says. Her walk carries direction and urgency. The beeline she makes to the soft drink counter is nothing short of a heat-seeking warpath--Sunny notices she makes way for no one; she never has to. Bent grandmothers and fresh-faced toddlers alike leave her a wide berth despite never having seen her enough to appreciate her swan dive from grace.

It reminds him of the fable his sister told him, the one about a fox sauntering through the jungle with a tiger behind his heels. But he doesn’t know who’s the tiger of the two of them. It makes him nauseous. 

“Not to get all philosophical on ya,” she says, tossing him a Slurpee cup and pressing her own to the rim of the blue raspberry machine, “but you’re gonna start to like it. People leaving you alone like this. There’s a certain sorta….” She sucks on her teeth and watches the churning machine twist round and round like a cat eyeing a fishbowl.

“Power.” He doesn’t know if he says it loud enough to be heard over the drone of the supermarket--its machines, its lights, the electricity that runs through its ceiling wires.

A head tilt and a slight smile. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right, actually. Power. I like the sound of that. What, uh--shit. It’s not turning off.” The iced gloop runs over the rim of her cup and spills over her hands before Sunny can crank the machine shut. She jerks her chin towards a shelf of drink accessories. “Fuck. Get me a lid and a straw?”

Sunny holds them out to her. 

“No, genius. My hands are dirty. Gimme the straw.” 

Sunny blinks. 

“Trust me. Check this out. I’m gonna teach you a lil’ secret here.” She opens her mouth. 

Sunny gingerly drops a Slurpee straw in her mouth. She catches with her teeth and sucks the excess blue drink off her hands the best she can. “Okay, this is the cool part.” She sticks the straw into the cracks of the cup gutter.

“Aubrey, you aren’t actually going to…. “ Sunny watches, nose crinkled.

Aubrey pauses as if waiting for a divine signal. 

“Nah,” she says, and removes the straw. “I’m not that insane. But I’m gonna do it someday. I’m gonna do it.” She smiles at Sunny, teeth and hands stained with blue. 

Sunny’s stomach turns. He hands her a clean straw without a word, one that hasn’t touched the forbidden juice swamp at the bottom of the Slurpee machine. 

She cackles. “Thanks, Sun. You shoulda seen the look on your face.” After she assembles her cup, she gestures for another one. “What flavor?”

Sunny has now decided that this girl should not be trusted around any sort of beverage or beverage-related equipment. He nudges her out of the way and neatly pours his Lemon Slurpee as Aubrey, in her own Aubrey way, pouts audibly. “Your mom didn’t teach you not to play with food?” 

Aubrey winks. “My mom didn’t teach me anything.”

Despite Sunny’s protests, she pays for both of their cups, sifting through the pile of coins on the cashier’s counter with deft fingers. “It’s alright,” she says. “These few days have to have been rough on you. Besides, I got a favor to ask of you. I’ll tell you when we go out.” She leaves blue fingerprints on the counter, which Sunny wipes away with the paper receipt. 

Again, Sunny has to make peace with how fast she walks--or maybe everyone’s grown taller except for him. He tags along behind her to the fountain beside the plaza. It’s night now, and the crickets have begun their senseless calls. The world is jaundiced in the light of several towering lamps. If this were real, if he were twelve again in a summer night like this, then he’d have to be home soon. But this time, nothing waits for him at home, not family, not dreams. So he feels the pleasant air around him smelling of cut grass and kitchen exhaust and follows her to a pool of yellow light shining upon the fountain. 

He’s never paid much attention to this generic-looking piece of plaza architecture, but late at night, a sort of mysticism envelops it, heightened by deep jagged shadows and the soft glimmering of coins beneath the leaf-littered surface. 

Aubrey sits crosslegged on the edge of the water, swatting away summer mosquitos with absent waves of her hand. She pats the seat next to her. “So, the favor.”

He sits, folding his legs into each other. “Yeah.”

Aubrey stares straight forward. Her eyelashes cast spiky shadows across her hollow cheeks. “Help me get away from this hellhole.”

Sunny doesn’t process it at first. “Huh?”

“I’m not asking for much. It’s just… bus fares to the city are sorta pricey… and since you’re catching a ride there anyway… I thought maybe… “ She gestures vaguely into the night, disturbing clouds of gnats. Color--or however much he can see of it under the bleaching glare of sodium lamplight--returns to her cheeks. She’s blushing. 

“This is crazy, Aubrey,” he says. He tries to place her anywhere in the throes of city crowds, fitting her into a college campus here, a fast-food counter there, like a bright pink paper doll. And strangely enough, he can see it. “I mean, where are you even gonna go? It’s not safe for you.” 

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve been--I’ve been preparing. I’ve been planning this, trust me.” She takes a big gulp of her drink and winces at the cold. 

“Right, right. Then where are you gonna go, specifically?” 

“I-I don’t know.” She throws her hands up. “Somewhere. It’s not hard to just, I don’t fucking know, survive. Anywhere but here.” 

As stupid as it sounds to him, he can’t help but agree. But he won’t admit that, not yet. “What about Kel and Hero? And the Hooligans?”

“They’ll manage without me. Kel and Hero especially. And I’ll manage without them. Kim’s planning to go to college in the city anyway… I think. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Hell yeah I don’t know. Look. I didn’t come here to argue with you--whether you help me or not, I’m going.” Her straw has bite marks when it comes out of her mouth. “When you told me you were leaving-- I just--I don’t know. There’s no reason for me to stay here anyway.”

“This is insane, even by your standards. Your bat’s not going to protect you in the city. You’ll be homeless, jobless. And you won’t have a way back here.”

“I’ve got you.”

Sunny puts his slurpee down and buries his face in his hands. “You’re insane. And my mom would never, ever agree to this.”

She shrugs. “I mean, you could just tell her I’m visiting a friend. I’m not bringing too much anyway.” 

“You’re going to get kidnapped. Or mugged. We’ll find your body in a ditch in a few weeks.” And he can’t be complicit, not this time. 

An ice-cold hand jostles his shoulder. “Hey. Sunny. Look at me. I’ll be okay, everything’ll be okay.” 

He looks up at her silhouette, the light sliding like molten glass over her hair. She smiles like she genuinely believes it. It warms her cheeks and for a little while, she does look twelve again with sugar staining her lips and hope in her eyes. 

“No, I can’t. I can’t.”

“That’s okay. I’m glad I got to spend this time with you. This isn’t just me trying to pry a favor from ya anyway. I wanted to say goodbye, too.” 

“I’m not leaving until--”

“If you won’t help me, I’m leaving tomorrow morning, before my mom wakes up. I’ll hitchhike, or bike, or something.” She squeezes his hand. “So, wish me luck. Maybe I’ll find you again. Maybe I will die in a ditch. It’s better than rotting alive here.” 

Sunny shudders at the thought. He didn’t want to leave her like that, and he has to admit that she does have a point. Aubrey, with her colourful hair and her bubblegum chewing, has become too loud, too bright for this small suburban town to contain. The holes in her shoes and her tendency to fish the coins out of fountains right after they’d been used for wishing branded her a pest to most of the town and a corrupting influence to the neighbourhood children. But in the city, she’d blend right in. No one would cast a second glance at her--from what little Sunny knew of the nebulous concept of “the streets,” Aubrey was made for them. 

“Augh. To clarify, I’m not agreeing to this. But it’s not a no, either.” Sunny rubs his eye again--not eyes, plural. He’s made that mistake too many times in the hospital to embarrass himself around people. “I just… need to think about it.”

Aubrey’s eyes light up like twin rocket flares. “Really?” She shakes his hand and jumps, almost knocking over her slurpee. 

“If you want, you can have dinner at my place. We’ve got frozen pizza, but…”

She raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“It’s not much, but you can use the bathroom there,” he mumbles. He dusts off his lap and stands, turning away before the unavoidable--

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?” Aubrey’s indignant yelp startles a nearby bushful of crickets into silence. 

“You’re out of hot water again, right?” He sips his drink, avoiding her eyes and studying the pattern of the pavement on the ground.

“... Yeah. But that’s none of your business. Jerkass.” A quick glance at her: she’s still beetfaced with her arms crossed and her foot making quick nervous taps on the floor. She fixes her matted hair with a frantic hand. “Um. Yeah, let’s go to your place. Thanks for, uh, yeah.”

“Yeah.”

As she stalks off past him, Sunny can feel waves of exasperation rolling off her skin. It always puzzled him why his sister and Aubrey ended up smelling the exact same--maybe all girls used the same soap? But that wouldn’t have made any sense because Mrs. Betsy from the attendance office smelled like horrendous cloying vanilla with a hint of lye. Kel had turned his nose up to that question. “It’s the smell of cooties,” he had said, as they knelt in the front garden and dug for worms and grubs. 

“Gross.” Sunny said, looking at the handful of worms in Kel’s paws. 

“Absolutely.” Kel said, oblivious.

He asked Hero and Basil, who were harvesting carrots in the backyard. They shared a glance and shrugged.

And then he asked Mari. Her eyes were sad and she shook her head and told him not to worry about it. 

The revelation came to him sometime during those hazy four years of seclusion. But by then, no one in his life smelled like that anymore, so it didn’t really matter. 

Sometimes he thinks about what other secrets the two girls might have shared. The thought that Aubrey, like some paleolithic artifact, is one of the few last living pieces of her history scares him. Aubergine flickers between pools of streetlight now, casting nervous fleeting glances behind her to make sure he’s following her, across the parking lot, onto the sidewalk, where a wind once again blows from the north, hinting at the coming autumn.

The way home is silent.


	2. pizza time

As they approach Sunny’s house. The streetlights dimly illuminating the path in front of the house are the same color as honeyed syrup on a white paper plate. The house itself looms dark and empty over its yard, its second floor extending up and evaporating into the night. 

Aubrey remembers the good times she had here in the backyard, where they had played games, ate snacks, and even built their own tree house. She remembers one day in particular where she had half-sprinted half-sobbed her way to Sunny’s house to get away from her mother and father who were vehemently arguing with each other as they usually did, and found Mari alone and reading in the backyard, under her favorite tree.

Mari looked up from her book when she heard the fence gate open.

“Hi Aubrey!” Mari said, smiling until she scanned her tear-stained face. “Aubrey?” Mari asked. She gestured for her to come sit next to her, and Aubrey did, smoothing down her skirt before she sat cross-legged on the lawn. A ladybug flew up, startled.

She cried more easily back then. Obviously, she was younger and less in control of her emotions, but some part of her wonders if that was the only factor at play.

“What’s wrong?” Mari asked, wrapping her arms around her.

Aubrey sniffled and leaned into Mari. “My mom and dad are arguing again…”

Mari’s expression changed to a look of concern and she hugged her closer, running her hands through her hair. “It’s alright, Aubrey. You’re always welcome to find me,” Mari said.

Aubrey sniffled again and looked up at Mari.

“Really?”

“Really.” 

It meant everything to Aubrey that she had a place to go when things were bad at home. Soon she wouldn’t be able to come by here anymore. The quiet boy standing behind her was the last piece of Mari she had left.

In the four years that Sunny had locked himself away in the room, the house had grown gradually less and less home-like. It wasn’t unkempt, like how her own house had physically declined when it lost its home status; rather, it was too tidy, with freshly-clipped grass and manicured topiaries by the front window. The house was preparing itself for the market.

As the tree in the backyard is now only a stump, soon this house will no longer be Sunny’s house, even if it stopped being Sunny’s home for far longer. The potential buyers will wear blue slips over their shoes, the SOLD sign will erect itself in the lawn, and her new neighbors would paint the house something else entirely--plant a tree maybe, or dig up the stump to put a pool in the backyard, or retile the roof. If Sunny hadn’t invited her tonight, she would have visited anyway and paid her respects to this house, the epicenter of all things.

She was pushed out of her thoughts by Sunny tugging on her arm with a silent “We’re here.” She pushed his hand away and turned around “Wh--Yeah, I know.”

She takes a final moment to look up at the cold facade of the house that Sunny grew up in before padding onto the driveway. The way stepping into it shuts her up and quells the incessant raging of her heart reminds her of being in a church. 

She raises a hand to knock on the door, then pauses. 

“Yeah, my mom’s not home,” Sunny says. “Door’s unlocked, just go in.” 

“Hrm.” She quite liked Sunny’s mom, and had hoped she could smile sweetly at her and ask her for a ride into the city like she used to ask adults for candy money.

She opens the door and slaps around at the wall in the dark for a light switch. Finding it after jamming her palm into the switch. The living room lights up, empty as ever.

“Calm down, we’re trying to sell this place, remember?” Sunny mumbles. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Aubrey shoves her fists into her pockets. “Where’s the pizza?”

“It’s on the island in the kitchen. I’ll go get it into the oven.” Sunny says, shuffling into a neighboring hallway. Aubrey takes off her sneakers and kicks them besides Sunny’s, trailing him to the kitchen and leaning on the doorframe.

Sunny leans on the counter, waiting for the oven to preheat. He taps his fingers on the granite and chews on his cheek. Aubrey watches him without really watching him, instead focusing her eyes on the slight stains on the walls, where family portraits once hung. The oven hums. 

“What are you planning to do in the city?” he finally asks. 

She’s planning so much. The city was built for people like her, with bags under their eyes but ferocity in the way they talk, they dress, the way they move through life. Her favorite radio station broadcasts from the city center. It plays the least commercials at night, when she opens the attic window and leans out into the cool air. She places her chin on folded hands on spring Thursday nights, looking to the north for the source of the transmissions, sometimes closing her eyes to pretend she's in a small apartment high above city streets, maybe shared with a roommate, a few plants on the windowsill including alfalfa to feed her rabbit.

Sometimes, she dreams bigger. Her imagination sweeps untamed through her mind. She’ll buy giant leather rocker boots from the Top Hottic in the shopping district mall and stomp her way into nightclubs and subway-tunnel gatherings. Where will she get the money? Where she’s always gotten the money. There’s money if you know where to find it, if you’re willing to dive and scrounge and sink ass-deep in sewer muck for it. It’s like the rainbow pools of sugar slime at the bottom of the Slurpee machine. You’ll suck up drowned flies and colonies of germs, but the calories will feed you for another day. 

People like her--those dodgers of the five-second rule, the five-hour rule, the five-day rule--take what they can get, just as she's done for her entire life. She's young and pretty and has nothing left to lose. These three qualities make her very employable in a certain potentially lucrative enterprise. Well, and the pink hair definitely helps.

But it's not like Sunny will understand that. He's socially stuck in middle school, after all. Best to play stupid.

“I told ya. Roam. Find some... odd jobs. Survive. That’s it, basically.” Aubrey says. She shrugs and tosses her hands up. 

Sunny side-eyes her. He raises an eyebrow, then lowers it. “That doesn’t sound like much of a plan.” 

Aubrey looks away. It occurs to her that Sunny is not twelve anymore, and will not be fooled as easily as her mother when she's drunk.

The oven beeps shrilly, startling them both. “I guess the convection ovens are pretty fast,” says Sunny, turning back to the oven. “You can head upstairs while this is cooking. Er, you know where the shower is, right?”

“Yeah.” Aubrey blushes. “Course I do.” She flees the doorway and scampers up the stairs. The bathroom unchanged from the last time she had seen it, noticeably more showhome-like with a decorative plant placed on the counter in between the sinks. There is no scent of mildew or undercurrent of lily.

She disrobes and throws her clothing next to a small hamper so she could change back into them later, as she hadn’t brought any spare clothing. She steps into the tub and turns on the hot water, immediately recoiling, having turned the dial too far and not expecting the heat of the water. 

She adjusts the dial and steps back in, now having caused water to fly all over the floor. On the counter beside her, she found some floral shampoo, no doubt Sunny’s mom’s as it was adjacent to a bottle of men’s all-in-one shampoo, conditioner, body wash and lamp oil. 

As strange as it was to be back in this bathroom, it was heaven to have some proper shampoo and conditioner for once. Aubrey can’t remember the last time her hair had felt this smooth, having used mostly bland nameless soap that she got with the little pocket change she had.

It felt nice, and for once in a while, it smelt nice too. The warmth of the water melts away her fatigue, her tension. She closes her eyes and lets the suds run down her face and whirlpool into the drain, carrying her filth with it.

It wasn’t that she was out of hot water, really. The heater broke down from time to time and needed to be cleaned and prodded, its pipes unclogged and valves sealed. After Sunny’s confession, she went home, equipped her wrench, and stared at the rusty thing in her garage, and she decided that every cell in her body was exhausted--utterly pooped, as Kim would say--and she would rather run away than fix it for what seemed like the seventieth time.

She rinses the last bit of soap out of her hair and turns off the water, stepping out and reaching for the towel rack to find nothing but air. “Shit.” 

After squeezing the water from her hair, she turns, leaving a trail of wet footprints, to the sink cupboard in search of any hidden towels, but to no avail. She considered using the hair dryer on the sink to dry herself momentarily and then shook the idea off. 

Water streaming down her legs, she stands in the center of the bathroom on the warm stone tiles, rubbing the instep of one foot on the other. She looks at herself in the mirror and counts her ribs to avoid dealing with the reality that--

No, she is not dealing with reality. She is going to come out dripping wet with her clothes on, soaked, and she will leave a shivering line of water droplets all the way from the bathroom down to the kitchen and not give a shit about it. 

Yeah. As if. She’ll catch pneumonia on the way home and die a horrible, warbly death.  
“I’m going to have to ask him for a towel. Oh my god.” Aubrey murmurs to her mirror image, whose face reddens like a strawberry ripening timelapse. “Fuck. Fuck!” 

Her ears pick up rapid almost-subaudible thumping up the stairs, summoned by her profane outburst. 

“Aubrey, are you in there?” Sunny’s voice asks, followed by three hesitant knocks.

Aubrey freezes.

“You good?” He asked, knocking again. 

Aubrey debates staying silent and letting him assume she had dematerialized. If there were a window, she would have climbed out of it. “Uhhhh, yeah,” she says. “Slight issue. Very slight.”

“Did you bang yourself on the foot of the tub? I know it can be sharp sometimes.” Sunny asks innocently.

“No-- I uh-- The towels…” Aubrey mumbled back, tripping over her words as she spoke. 

“Oh. Oh.” She swears she can hear him swallow between his words. She imagines him blushing and blushes harder before forcibly kicking that image out of her mind.

They both stand in silence for a moment. Then another. Goosebumps crawl across her skin. The air in the room is thick, lily-scented, and clogs her sinuses.

“...Do you want me to get you a towel?” Sunny says. 

“No, just let me stand here and drip-dry for the rest of the night.” Aubrey snaps, still shivering.

A pause. “Alright, if that’s what you--”

“No, dolt. A towel will be nice.”

Footsteps cascade down the stairs, receding into silence. The minutes when he’s gone are the most hilariously miserable she’s felt all week. She doesn’t know why she’s so weird about it all--she’s done worse and more humiliating things. She’s eaten an earthworm before, for a ten-dollar dare, felt it slither like ice down her gullet. This shouldn’t phase her at all.

“Okay… I… have the towel.” Sunny’s voice, gentle with a hint of concern and something else Aubrey can’t place, floats through the wooden door.

“Okay. Okay, what’s going to happen is you’re going to hand me that towel through the door when I open it, and if I catch you looking, you’ll be lucky if you don’t end up in a ditch yourself.” Aubrey said, with a mix of embarrassment and shivering in her voice.

“...Got it,” Sunny said.

Maybe it’s because Sunny knew her before she was Aubrey the pink-haired, Aubrey the bat-wielder. Maybe that’s why this is so fucking weird.

She inhales, wipes her hand on her thigh, and twists the doorknob. A small, pale hand carrying a towel snakes into the crack between door and the doorjamb. Aubrey snatches it from him and slams the door shut, heart pounding.

“Hey! You almost snapped my fingers off,” Sunny calls. 

Aubrey’s face threatens self-immolation. “Sorry.”

“So uh, the pizza is ready… just come down when you’re done in there…” Sunny says, the quaver in his voice matching Aubrey’s.

“Uh… yeah… sounds good…” Aubrey mumbles back. Her grabbing hand finds the hair dryer and she turns it on the highest setting to drown out any noises Sunny makes outside. 

Aubrey wraps herself in the towel; it’s downy, much more luxurious than the ones she has at home. Sunny’s house always had fluffy towels that smelled of fabric softener. She peels the rattier-looking wet band-aids from her shins and arms. Some have half-healed sticky cuts and scrapes underneath; some have nothing but bare, smooth skin. 

She leans into the counter and looks into the mirror; redness still flares from the tops of her cheekbones, but the rest of her face was on its way to cooling down.

She changes back into her clothes and opens the door. The hallway is bordered by railings which open in the middle to make way for the top of the staircase. She stands at the top and looks down for a bit, waiting for something to knock her over, an unlocked memory or a wave of grief. But nothing happens. It doesn’t even look that far down.

No wonder they’re moving out. Sunny and his mother walk past this staircase many times a day--do they pause here every time? Do they think about the way she fell? Even if ghosts don’t exist, this place is haunted. She grips the handrail extra tightly as she descends. 

Even if she scrawls it on the newspaper she cuts up for her rabbit’s bedding, even if she says it to herself as she’s lying awake waiting for the colorless green fog of sleep to claim her, she can never really believe that Sunny killed Mari. 

The bottom of the staircase has nothing unusual about it, either. This is just a normal-ass stairway. The boy past the hallway to the kitchen as well--is he not just a normal boy? She watches him slice the pizza into sixths with smooth, unbroken motions fitting of only the sharpest of kitchen knives. 

From behind, he looks normal, distinguished even. He dresses timelessly and with taste. She’s sure fifteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to dress like that, at least not the typical, sane ones. He’s too quiet, too. Some boys are quiet because they don’t think, but Sunny’s silence is contemplative and somewhat threatening. 

She’s sure it’s because his murderer-ness radiates from him in steady pulses like a police siren, but her heart goes ever so slightly faster next to him. This is the boy who killed what amounted to the love of her life. The scar from the knife slash he gave her weeks ago is the only one on her arms he directly inflicted, but the rest? His actions were indirectly complicit. Hell, he might be complicit for every scar and bruise on her body. Every fight she started, she did to mourn her.

Barefoot, she pads up behind him, eyes transfixed on the gliding motion of his knife hand. Hearing her, he turns. A slight smile lights up his face. 

“Feeling better?” he says. 

He’s smaller than her, but in his sights she feels like a cornered prey animal. “Yeah.” Sunny the Uncanny. Sunny the Unheimlich. She’s pretty much made it up as best she could with Hero and Kel, but Sunny’s another monster. He says it was an accident, but was it really? The faint white line across her arm is evidence otherwise. 

What happened with Basil and the lake was an accident as well, though, and of the perfectly same caliber. Her hands shot out of their own will, to do something to someone, enact a force upon the world? But what of those daydreams of hers? Those nights when she'd go in the backyard and swing her bat at the idea of him? Maybe, so secretly inside her, she wanted him dead.

That makes her and Sunny two of a dying breed, then.

“Here. I hope you like pepperoni. Or, I mean, you can give them to me if you don’t.” He places the knife gently on the kitchen counter with a tiny *tap* and sets two slices on two plates. “I like pepperoni.” 

“Um, me too.” She doesn’t give a shit about pepperoni, but she’ll say just about anything to fill the silence. “But you can have mine.” 

“No, it’s okay. You should eat more.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“Yeah.” It’s not awkward for him at all; he’s eating his pizza with relish and muted delight. But Sunny’s a watcher--this she knows by how he’s always shushed Kel when he asked too many questions about Aubrey’s parents. As a child, he knew more than he let on, always secretive. Does he feel the same prickle on the back of his neck? The same tautness in his calves, ready to bolt if needed?

Like this house, he’s too pretty and clean to have such a tainted soul.

“Aubrey?” Sunny asks, scanning Aubrey’s eyes. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, uncomfortable from the amount of staring. “Your pizza is still there. Are you not hungry?”

Aubrey bristles and blinks; a chill runs down her spine; she’d been zoning out without realizing. “Shit, sorry.” 

“Mmh.” Sunny bites down on his pizza and gives her the slightest hint of a nod. 

Aubrey takes a bite of the pizza, it’s not as greasy as the stuff from Gino’s, but it doesn't taste homemade either. Must be store bought. She perches on a barstool by the peninsula and wolfs it in big gulps, wiping the sauce from her face in between bites. After the first slice disappears, she reaches for another. She’s aware of Sunny’s eyes on her, but she doesn’t care. A hungry girl is an unstoppable girl. 

“So, uh… what’ve Kel and Hero been up to? And Basil, I guess,” Aubrey says.

“You haven’t been talking to them?” 

“Nah. I don’t know. We don’t get along too good. I’ve been hangin’ out with Kim and the others.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

She decides not to engage in small talk ever again. Sunny delicately peels the pepperoni from his pizza and eats it in five tiny bites.

“I mean, it’s not like we don’t get along. It’s weird. Especially Hero makes it weird, for some reason. I think he keeps trying to keep us together like we were before… yeah. But it’s not working and it’s just…”

“It’s not enjoyable.”

“No, it’s not. It fucking sucks. Especially since Basil and Kel play along with it. Or maybe it genuinely isn’t weird for them. Maybe I’m just a bitch or something.”

“No--”

“Don’t try to tell me I’m not. I know what I am.”

“No, I was gonna say there’s nothing wrong with that.” 

Aubrey tilts her head and gives him a scrutinizing, pointed smile. “Guess there isn’t. I just don’t think there’s any use in pretending things can ever go back to the way they were. We should just… move on. Leave. You and me, we got the right idea blowing this popsicle stand.”

She brings a knee up to her chest and huffs. Though she’s not blushing anymore, her body thrums with the warmth of hot pizza. “I don’t even know them anymore. They look the same, talk the same, but they aren’t.”

“People change. For better or for worse.” Sunny said as he nibbled on another piece of pepperoni.

“That they do. And I wish they’d quit acting like I’m Aubrey from fifth grade. I don’t even look like her anymore! My entire color palette is different!”

Sunny makes a noise halfway between a snort and a snicker. “I look the exact same.”

She tries to imagine Sunny in a different style and can’t. Sunny is the boy who wears a sweater vest in the summer and he will always be that boy. “Little bit taller, though.”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

“Give yourself some credit.” She smiles and wipes her fingers on her leg. “Yeah, but I know you’re not the same, even if you really didn’t grow at all in four years. Of course you wouldn’t be the same. It kinda makes it easier to talk to you, I think.”

“That’s good. I like talking to you.” Sunny somehow finds another piece of pepperoni to nibble on as he blushes.

“Yeah? Well don’t get too used to it.” Aubrey examines the crumbs on her plate so she doesn’t have to see his face fall. “Don’t forget this popsicle stand’s getting nuked to hell and back. Kaboom.”

Sunny fails to comprehend her slang, and tilts his head in confusion.

She makes explosion gestures with her hands. “Y’know. Blam. Sploosh. Uh… Skadoosh.” 

Incredulity spreads across Sunny’s expression, mixed in with something that makes Aubrey’s insides churn. He resembles his sister so much, and yet, so little. At certain angles, the structure of his face could almost be identical… almost. It’s the eyes, though, that radiate Mari-ness, but in a way so different from the original it makes her wonder if she’s just seeing things. Uncontrolled, her eyes linger too long on him, even if it hurts to stare.

“Um,” she chokes, trying to move the conversation past this snag. “So… “

“Hey, I think I have something to show you.”


	3. dress up time :)

Her eyes flit across his bedroom, absorbing the castles of cardboard boxes and the singular small bed nestled against the far wall. With a finger, she taps the potted plant and, upon finding plastic vascularity instead of squishy organic veins, glares at it as if personally offended by it. A high moon sends its beams through the window, washing everything in sterile white. At this time of day, his room feels like the room from his dreams--or maybe he’s losing his mind.

He reminisces about the weight of the wooden handle of the kitchen knife in his hands. He can almost remember the way it sounded the first time it clattered into his dreams, metallic like the inside of his mouth. In his peripheral vision, his cast shadow has the open milky eyes of a dead carp.

He shivers. Aubrey makes a little concerned noise and asks if he’s alright, which he answers with a nod.

“About this… I didn’t show you then, cause you know... “

Her smile flickers like the halogens of an old car. “I’m alright. I’ll be alright.”

“Right.” Sunny turns and wades in the swamp of boxes, searching for a box that was once labeled, then had its name scribbled out with a permanent marker. A tiny mechanical click behind him, and warm yellow replaces the moonlight, turning his own shadow cold. 

“Here ya go.” At times, Aubrey’s voice drops the gravel of radio cool-girls and reverts to the smooth tinkle of her youth. When he looks back at her, she’s peeling the black polish from her nails. 

His shadow falls perfectly across a large box with a black stain the length of four letters on its face. 

He nudges the corner with his toe. The texture of the paper is a lot more worn than the other boxes, with water stains and peeling taped edges. “Found it.” Someone less perceptive might not recognize it, but this box is the oldest in this room. “Have at it. Feel free to try on anything you want in the washroom--take anything you want, I guess. We don’t know what to do with it.” 

“Oooooh.” She drags the box into the center of the room and plops down. In anticipation of the plume of pure scent that will burst from the box once Aubrey opens it, Sunny throws himself at his chair and rolls over to his computer. He boots up a game of blackjack and lets the hemocyanin of his desktop background pull him away from Aubrey’s meddlings.

It turns out nothing can shelter him from the spores of Mari’s scent, four years old. His teeth clench. Seven of hearts is his first card--then the two of spades. 

He presses the white button on the bottom of the screen. Hit me.

Aubrey pulls open the box and jolts back stiffly, as if shocked. In his peripherals, her face is a blur, but he doesn’t need to see it to know her hurt. She rummages for something, finds it at the bottom of the box, and pulls it out. The delicate bottle of Mari’s perfume was still three quarters full; Mari had treated it as elixir, too precious to squander.

Aubrey opens it, takes a whiff, and grimaces. She looks at Sunny and he looks back to his blackjack game. His next card’s an ace. Hit me.

She starts at the top, with all the pretty turtlenecks and plain white shirts Mari had worn countless times out on their adventures. As she digs deeper into the box she unveils shirts and sweaters Mari used to sleep in, in the bed next to his. Her sleep was so still compared to his, so deep, her sides barely rising and falling wrapped in the soft lilac tee Aubrey now holds to the light, that sometimes he had worried that he wouldn’t be able to tell if she died.

She finds one of Mari’s old bras as well, but… yeah, no. Both of them arrive at the conclusion simultaneously that they will not fit her and likely never will fit her. She places them ashamedly back in the box with the reverence of a pilgrim handling a holy relic.

He averts his eyes and turns a six. Hit me again, he tells the computer. His fingers slip against the mouse and almost misclick.

Aubrey’s excavation reveals a white, spectral long-sleeved dress and some plain black tights. With a flutter, she disappears out the doorway, the articles of clothing trailing behind her like the translucent veils of jellyfish. 

Sunny breathes through his mouth. It’s as if his head is stuffed with alcohol-dipped cotton balls--the scent of his sister, though light, is overwhelming.

“Ahem.” 

Sunny makes the mistake of looking up. 

Aubrey stands in his room, arms slightly held back, a bird preparing for flight. White fabric cascades down her shoulders ending at her knees, with black stocking-clad legs poking out from them like twigs. If he squints, he can see her neon bandaids through them, but he doesn’t squint, can’t move his eyes from her; he swallows, once, twice, downing a strange mix of bile, salt, and empty air. Thank god her hair’s pink. Thank god. 

“Well? How do I look?” Aubrey says.

“Really… good…” That dress is from… the remembrance of it all twists a dull, throbbing blade into the center of his chest. Mari wore that dress to the Italian restaurant a city over, where Sunny ate the biggest ravioli he had ever seen. In the half-cold half-warm cocktail of lamplight and moonlight, the shadows under Aubrey’s eyes, chin, and the hem of her dress take an ethereal, filmy luster. 

Yes, she's beautiful, but as a haunting, untouchable hologram of a girl. There's nothing he wants more than to… no, his hand would phase right through her.

“I actually sorta like these, do you mind if I keep them?” Aubrey asks, doing a little spin. The gossamer fabric tosses selenite and memories across the room. 

But Sunny doesn’t hear anything--his eyes, ears, and mouth struggle to spit out the same cotton balls soaked in the formaldehyde scent of an animal long dead. Before him, Aubrey hosts his sister, returns life to her and emulates her with a smile she might have smiled and a lightness of foot found in the happiest of girls. She returns to the way she was--alive. Aubrey returns to the way she was--untainted, with smooth pale arms and nothing but an unquenchable love of cute animals in her pink little head.

Both of them bleed into each other, creating this hybrid woman before him. He feels twice the love and four times the plummeting feeling in his gut when things go irretrievably, irreversibly wrong.

Aubrey cocks her head. “Sunny? You okay?” 

“Uh,” Sunny chokes. “Yeah. Yeah.”

Sunny’s hands shake too hard to stifle now, and he hits twenty in blackjack and for some reason presses hit me again. Bust. But he barely registers it; he’s trying to keep his teeth from chattering and catching her attention. 

“You… sure?”

“... Yeah.”

She plops back down to the box. “Alright then. Heh. Score.” 

She arranges her findings in concentric ritualistic circles around her. A Disneyland t-shirt fit for a five-year-old. A pair of child-sized crocs coloured pink, bejeweled with a glue gun and glitter.

“Hey, Sun, you ever remember Mari wearing these?” Aubrey says. 

He tilts his head, kneels next to Aubrey, and examines the shoes.

“Hm. I think she wore these when we went to Mexico on vacation. She really liked them.” He gingerly takes the shoes from Aubrey’s hands. “I don’t suppose you’d have any reason to take these. Maybe we’ll give them to Susie.”

Aubrey sighs and looks at the shoes. They are much too small for her and yet she watches them longingly, as if they hold some sort of meaning to her beyond shoes she had never seen Mari wear.

“Well…” She picks at a small rip in the stockings. “Thanks for the clothes. I really like them.”

“I'm sure Mari would want you to have them.”

Aubrey smiles--no, glows--at Sunny, and this time, it is convincing.

Sunny’s ears heat up. They sit on the floor together like they used to back when they were twelve. Aubrey combs a hand through her still-damp hair, creating a curtain between her face and Sunny’s which she hides behind. 

She looks away. “Welp, uh, I guess I’ll be back tomorrow…” A bashful giggle erupts from her throat.

They sit in silence for another endless moment. Aubrey checks the ends of her hair absently, a slight flush creeping across her face. She makes no move to leave, or… is she waiting for him to tell her to leave?

But he could never do that. She knows that, right? She's waiting for him to ask her to stay. It must be it. But what if he's overthinking--

“Uh… I’m not opposed to you staying the night… Not like my mom’s using her bed tonight...” Sunny blurts out, rubbing his neck nervously and forcing himself not to stutter.

With a gulp of her throat, Aubrey’s eyes gain a peculiar shine. She tucks her hair behind her ear, lifting the curtain between them and revealing a slight, shocked pout on her flushed lips.

“Yeah?”

“If you’re down. You are, right?”

She mumbles something, then clears her throat and mumbles more intelligibly. “Uh-- Yeaaah, suremaybeIdunno...”

“I'm sure you would probably fit into one of Mari’s old pajamas.” Sunny says, fingering the hem of his sweater.

Aubrey stands up and dusts off her knees, despite there being no dust on the floor.

“Mmm, yep, gotta… do that… I’ll go… get ready…” She walks out of the room stiffly, hands around her elbows.

Sunny hears the bathroom door slam closed, then a squeal from the other side of the wall that is quickly muffled. 

What a weird girl. He likes it.

* * *

Despite the large, comfy bed smelling like lilies, she doesn’t sleep. Maybe it’s the pillows, or the unfamiliarity of the bed, or maybe she’s cold, despite her warm cat-themed pajamas that she had found in Mari’s box. Two rooms over, Sunny sleeps--or maybe he can’t sleep either? Maybe he’s thinking of her. 

She rolls over and pulls on her hair, groaning. She tries rolling up into a ball. Nothing. She stretches out. Nothing. She rolls over again--still nothing.

She sits up and swings her legs out of the bed. The inside of her mouth is dry; maybe a glass of water would be the key to finally falling asleep. She goes downstairs carefully; one hand feels around for the wooden solidness of the handrail in the dark. In the dimness, the stairs extend infinitely downwards.

The kitchen is similarly more expansive at night, even when the lights are on, with an unnerving emptiness as if its walls had been stretched thin. The clock on the microwave blinks 1:23. A steak knife is missing from the block, but she doesn’t think much of it.

Pilfering a cup from the cabinet, she walks over to the sink, filling it with cold water. As she sips on the cool water, idle thoughts flutter through her head: what the city would be like, how the air there would smell compared to the air out here.

She puts down her empty cup in the sink, turns off the light, and tiptoes up the stairs. Near Sunny’s room, a soft, deep snore can be heard. She stands in front of the door for a while, contemplating nothing but feeling the compulsion to contemplate, scratching the top of her foot with the toes of the other, before she decides to enter.

She cracks the door open and squints against the white beams moonlight flooding his room, and under the window, like a stone angel atop a tomb, is Sunny, with his chest rising and falling so gently as to be almost imperceptible. A chthonic rumble sounds from his throat, deeper than she thought his small frame was capable of generating. 

She pads over to his bedside. Asleep, his face looks cast in marble, like those of the buff Roman dudes in Kim’s art history books--only more delicate and somehow more still. He is unnervingly quiet while awake, but his slumber gives reason for this stillness and the deepness of his breaths. It’s less threatening now, and more beautiful. 

His eyelashes tremble, beset by dreams Aubrey will never learn of.

For a moment, she thinks of brushing his hair aside and planting her lips on his forehead, but the thought of it makes her feel very small. Instead, she touches his wrist with the tips of her fingers.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

And then she leaves, shutting the door very gingerly behind her.

Whatever stillness permeating Sunny’s room must have infected her, for in his mother’s room, sleep claims her as soon as she lets it. 

* * *

Sunny dreams of nothing. 

Underneath his pillow, his fist closes around the handle of a steak knife, in case it ever comes back. He’s been clean of it for weeks now, and with every dreamless night, his grip on the wooden handle grows looser. 


	4. egress

Aubrey wakes up the next morning to the smell of waffles and hot sunlight streaming from between curtains she forgot to close. She rolls out of bed ravenous and messy-headed. 

Downstairs, through the blur of sleep, she watches Sunny attempt to pull out some toaster-waffles with chopsticks and fail miserably, reaching always short of the actual waffle and grabbing at empty air or having it flop out of his grip. He grumbles and adjusts his eyepatch, as if that would recover some of his depth perception.

Aubrey sneaks up behind him, swipes a waffle with her long nails, and takes a bite. 

“Hey!” Sunny yelps, then looks back at her. “Oh, it’s you.” He smiles. “Sleep well?”   
  
“Like a baby, thanks,” Aubrey says, mouth full. The waffle has little fake blueberries in it that try their hardest to taste like real blueberries. It’s a valiant effort, but….    
  
Sunny also puts in valiant effort and gets nothing. Aubrey eats her waffle extra loudly near him as the waffle slips again and again out of his grasp.

“Aubrey.” 

She grins. “What?”

He mutters something under his breath and turns back to his task. When he finally manages to maneuver it onto a plate, he shakes his shoulders out and pours maple syrup over his meal.

“Damn, if I had known you had maple syrup I woulda had some with mine.” Aubrey says waving her half-eaten waffle in her hand, leaning on the counter. “Oh well.”

Sunny looks at her with the hint of a grin on his face. “Good things come to those who wait,” he says.

“Psh. Smartass.” Aubrey blows him off and takes another bite of her waffle. “It’s not waiting if you’re just--”

The phone rings. Before Aubrey can finish her retort, Sunny slips into the corridor.

“Hello? Oh, hi mom.”   
“Yep.”   
“Okay.”   
“Okay, will do.”

“Bye.”   
  
In this time, the leftover syrup on Sunny’s plate inexplicably and mysteriously disappears, and Aubrey, delighted and snickering, enjoys a corner of a waffle soaked in syrup. When she reaches over the counter to mop up another spot of syrup, Sunny returns. 

He stares. 

Aubrey stuffs the rest of the waffle in her mouth and puts her finger to her lips, which prompts a ludicrously exaggerated eyeroll on behalf of Sunny. 

“So, what’d your mom have to say?” Aubrey asks, brushing crumbs from her lips.   
  
“She’s not coming to pick me up. Looks like I’ve got to take the Greyhound into the city.” 

“Shit. Then… ugh, that sucks.” 

“Wait--” He swallows, catching his own outburst. “I mean, wait. I’ll spot your fare.” 

“I’ll be okay. It’s not  _ that _ far, anyhow.” 

“I’d be insane to let you do that. Let me cover for you? It’s not a big deal, seriously.”

Aubrey thinks. As much as she could use the lift, she’s not digging the damsel-in-distress sitch that’d put her in. “Fine. But I’ll cover the slurpees after we get there. Deal?”

“Deal.” 

* * *

The morning is used for their respective goodbyes. Sunny, Hero, and Kel perch atop the dock extending into the lake. Basil sits there too, but with a considerable distance from the rest. The sun beats down onto them with gentle strength and a light wind cajoles waves onto the shore. It’s pleasant, as if the universe had conspired to send him off on a last good day.

“Yo, check this.”

Kel sends a rock skimming across the surface of the water, only to have it sink and disappear the moment it makes contact with the lake with a melodic *plunk.*

He woops and pumps his fist. 

A small, flat rock lands in Sunny’s palms. “Yeah! Sunny, you try.”

Sunny weighs the rock in his fist and whips it forward. It skips four (or was it five?) times before falling beneath the surface. 

“That was… okay. It’s okay. You tried your best.” Kel claps him on the back--it’s evident he’s used to Hero’s more muscular back and not Sunny’s skin-then-spine build, because it almost knocks the wind out of him. “You’ll get it someday.”

“But… “

“He’s not skipping rocks. It’s about the sound it makes.” Hero looks up from his fishing rod and lobs his own pebble into the lake, creating a juicy, succulent *plonk.*

“Whoa…” Kel gasps. “You gotta teach me your secret.”

Though falling rocks would scare the fish away, Hero lets the two younger boys rain brimstone upon the lake. Sunny suspects he doesn’t expect to catch anything either way--he’ll take any excuse to sit idly and bask in summer sunlight. But there’s silence between them. Even though Kel smiles like he’s always smiled, Sunny knows their relationship is held together by what could be strands of spider silk.

Farther down the pier, Basil studies his own dim reflection in the water. Sunny gets up and kneels next to him.

He takes his frail body in his arms and breathes the scent of loam and castings off him. “I’ll call you. I’m not going anywhere.” 

Basil nods, his flaxen hair brushing against Sunny’s cheek. The hum of cicadas lifts off the water like steam. 

The space between them and the brothers is exactly the width of two seated girls. 

* * *

Her mother is draped on the sofa as per usual, surrounded by bottles and completely unresponsive. At this point, there’s no use tiptoeing. She won’t wake up even if Aubrey starts a house fire. She’s never done this before, but she opens the windows on her way to the attic. There're too many half-eaten takeout containers rotting around for the smell to go away completely, but she hopes that when she leaves, she’ll take some of the stench with her. 

She starts with pouring all her clothes into her old softball duffle bag, not bothering to fold them, rather just squishing them in. The photo of her and Kim slides into the folds of a down jacket in the bag, along with her wallet (stuffed with some cash and a fake ID), a few protein bars, and spare keys. And her bat, of course. And… It's not practical as taking her clothes, but she takes Mari's perfume as well.

She opens the rabbit enclosure and scoops Bun-bun up, pressing his soft fur to her cheek before putting him in a smaller rabbit crate, along with a bag of his food and a water bowl.

And like that, the room loses its owner. She didn’t take much, but she didn’t have much in the first place. A single poster on the wall remains, its colors leached by the sun until only the blue chiaroscuro of the smiling anime girl suggested she ever existed, but that was all that would be left of her. She slings the duffle bag over her shoulder and picks up the crate in her off hand, and carries both back down the ladder. 

Though a lump forms in her throat, she doesn’t cry--she refuses to shed a tear for this house that stopped being a home long ago. Instead, she spits to the side and stuffs earbuds into her ears, playing nothing on her cracked little phone.

She leaves a note tacked to the little fridge reading “Sorry, Mom. I can’t stand this place any more. If you ever get up and read this, don’t expect me to return your calls.”

On the couch, her mother lies catatonic. In her face is Aubrey’s, slightly sharper and very much sadder, with those cheekbones her father once married her for. She has one of those faces that makes you sad not because they’re ugly, but because they are divine and wasted in all senses of the word. A twisting pain seizes her chest and she considers going back and ripping up the note. Not like it would have changed much.

Instead, she stands and stares at the woman at the couch, the gentle pout of her lips, the birds’ nest of her hair, the varicose veins underneath skin like vellum, waiting for something to come to her, some kind of lesson or resolution that occurs at the conclusion of this arc. Or even some kind of pain. But nothing happens. 

She thinks of every bad thing that could possibly result from her departure and every good thing that might happen if she stays. Maybe in a few weeks her mom's liver fails and they don't find her body until Angel tries to use the house as a playground. Maybe her mom’s on the edge of recovery, and if she just dragged her a little harder away from the drink, they'd be able to move to the city together and get her to a clinic or something.

And nothing happens.   
  
Nothing continues to happen as she closes the door and leaves. Still, nothing occurs as she roams Faraway Town’s jail-cell sidewalks, accompanied by her north wind. When she reaches Kim’s house, she had almost forgotten she ever expected something to happen. 

She cedes Bun-bun to the small girl with red glasses sucking on a cherry lollipop. His black tapioca eyes scan her blankly. Do rabbits know what separation is? Despite it, do they know the same restlessness as humans? 

Bun-bun scratches an itch on his neck. Probably not, dumb, lucky creatures such as they.

“You got your cash?” Kim asks. 

“Yeah.”

“Winter clothes?”

“Yep.”

“Umbrella?”

“I’ll pick one up at the OM.”

Kim yanks the lollipop from her mouth with a pop. “Think you’re set, then.”

“Thanks, Kim. Owe ya big time. I’ll be back every so often to check on him. Call me.”

“That’s if you can even afford a data plan, you lunatic.” Behind her, a bedheaded Vance trundles down the stairs, scratching hot chip dust from his beard. “Whatcha wanna do now?”

Aubrey shrugs. She's got time before she meets Sunny at the station. “Call the gang. Ride around? Get pizza.”

“Crimes?” Kim pipes up. “They can't catch you if you're a city away.”

“Dunno. I'm feeling… solemn. I've got a solemn sorta thing going on.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Aubrey considers the bright suburban sprawl behind her and the godless blue horizon and makes her decision. “You know what? You and me and the gang. Let's go to church. Kinda wanna fuck around and get baptized or something.”

* * *

Her hair’s wet when he sees her again, at the bus station terminal with a duffel bag slung across her shoulder, leaning on the wall besides a brochure cabinet. He doesn’t even need to scan the crowd for her--she draws his eyes like a pink-tipped rocket flare. 

“Went for a swim?” he says.

“Yeah. Thought I’d visit the lake one last time.”

“Huh.” Aubrey was very blatantly not at the lake that morning, but he’s not one to pry into what trouble she gets into in her spare time.

They wait in the ticket queue side-by-side as Aubrey depletes the last of her lip gloss and chucks the empty tube into the trash can across the hall. “I’m over lip health,” she says with no prompt at all. She sways easily, with relaxed posture. He doesn’t know what kind of swim could lift her moods that much--this gentle golden-hour joy is odd on Aubrey, who he’s only seen at emotional extremes.

“That’ll be thirty dollars, please.” The man in the ticket office says.

“Are you sure? Two tickets into Main Street station, one way. That should be… “ Sunny scans the price chart hanging above his head. “... yeah, forty dollars.”

The ticket man leans forward. He winks and his mustache quivers in a fatherly, loving way. “Couple’s discount. Enjoy it, kiddo.”

“We-- uh, I-- you’re mistaken--“ His ears burn.

Aubrey snatches the cash from his fingers, counts thirty, then slaps it on the counter. “He’s a little shy, sorry,” she says, a gracious smile stretching her cheeks. It doesn’t fall until she receives the two tickets and their receipt. “Thanks, have a nice day, sir. C’mon,  _ babe _ .”

With that, she drags him away toward the bus platforms steaming in the noonday sun. He shakes her hand away from his sweating ones. “Aub--”

“Ten bucks is ten bucks,” she says. “Live freely and without waste. Oh, cool, we got seats next to each other.” She holds the ticket up to the light. “I hope there’s air conditioning.”

He follows her onto the bus and takes the window seat near the back as Aubrey stretches her legs into the empty midline from the aisle seat. She squints at the walls of the bus, at the squares of white sunshine painting soon-to-be occupied seats.

She cocks her head. “You hear that?” 

“What?” he asks, a moment before he hears it. From through the glass window, or wafting through the open accordion doors of the vehicle, come hollers of his name. He whips his head towards the window--almost presses his forehead against it--there, several scampering figures emerging from the terminal building. Kel, Hero, and a out-of-breath Basil almost push each other and hurrying passengers over running to the edge of the curb.

“Oh shit.” Aubrey says, ducking out of sight. 

Sunny stands and cracks the window open to let their words through. “Guys? What are you doing here?” 

“Saying goodbye, Sunny!” Hero shouts through his hands. 

“Yeah! It’s gonna be a lot lonelier here without you!” Kel bounces on the balls of his feet and waves aggressively. Tears glitter on his lower eyelashes. 

“Come back and visit us over the break, okay?” Basil says, a bit quieter than the other boys, with eyes open in terror--or to see as much of Sunny as he can before he melts away into the throngs of the city.

“I will! Don’t worry about me too much, guys, you have my number.” Sunny presses his face against the glass as the engine on the bus groans, shivers, and whines in preparation for its journey.

“Oh, and…” Hero puts his hands down, suddenly serious, suddenly looking so much older than the rest of them. Though he’s no longer yelling, Sunny can read his lips over the clamor of passengers flooding the carriage. “Take care of her. Please. Tell her I’m sorry.” 

As the bus starts to pull away, he nods, gives Hero a small thumbs-up before he understands what he promised. He watches Kel’s bouncing orange silhouette fade into the horizon and waves back until he can’t see him anymore, and then he waves for a little bit longer, at the rows of standing poplars and the town that raised him until he was too big for it to hold.

All but one of the original group end up leaving or planning to leave. Hero’s home is an eastern ivy-walled cloister of a school; Kel’s already gotten basketball offers from local schools. He and Aubrey flee into an urban jungle; Mari left in her own way. Basil… well. He’ll come back for him--with an internal smirk, Sunny realizes he as might as well be a professional runaway smuggler.

A sniffled choke coming from beside him drags him from his thoughts. Aubrey’s still curled like a pillbug on her seat and had been silently sobbing into her hands during their goodbyes.

Sunny doesn’t know what to do--it’s been a while since he’s consoled anyone besides Basil, but Basil is easy to console. He reaches out and lays his hand on her shoulder, patting her back. She doesn’t shake him off at all but instead curls up more tightly and cries with more vehemence. 

Sunny looks out the window as he comforts her shaking warmth. The drone of the engine masks the tiny sounds of her suppressed sobs; only when they stop at traffic junctions do her quiet sniffles make themselves known.

And then, abruptly, like a switch had been flipped, the trembling stops and she rises to a sitting position. “Thanks, Sunny…” she says, dragging her sleeve across her eyes. “I’m over it now. I think I’m gonna try and sleep.” 

She fiddles with the seat buttons before bringing her seat back into a comfortable recline.

“Good idea.” Sunny reclinines his chair next to hers and turns his face away. Today had been draining despite the lack of physical action, and he is more than content to sleep on the ride. 

As he shuts his eyes, something warm slips into his cold hands, then interlaces with his fingers. In the slight tension of her palm lies her question.

He answers it by giving her hand a gentle squeeze (like the one present in his chest), feeling it relax afterwards. It’s safe to rest here--nothing chases him, no trap of teeth await him at their destination. In the city, he is no murderer, and the girl whose hand he holds is no delinquent. And so he does, right onto Aubrey’s bony lily-smelling shoulder, her hair dark with dampness pooled beneath her head like spilled wine. She freezes, but stays silent and squeezes his hand back, puts her head atop of his. 

As Faraway Town and memories of it is claimed by the fog of distance, they sleep. They don’t know it, but they made a promise as binding as their fingers latching onto one another--somewhere along the ride, it’s not hand-holding but wrist-holding, with grip suited to drag a drowning man from water. 

Shadows of trees and telephone poles driven by brush across their faces, conquered little by little by the inescapable cast darkness of skyscrapers and construction cranes. Here, the sun only bleeds through the gap-toothed glass geometry when it is setting.


	5. fucked up camping

Aubrey wakes up first to the rude lurch of the ride stopping at a traffic light. The bus had finally entered the metropolitan center after what felt like an eternity, but in reality was only about two hours. With a start, she remembers how they had fallen asleep. But they were no longer touching. Sunny had turned away and curled toward the light streaming from the window. 

She shakes Sunny awake.

“Huh?” Sunny says, blinking and lifting his hands to rub his eyes… both eyes? Before he can rub his injured eye, she reaches forward and stops his hand. 

“Hey. Careful.”

“Mm. Hey, Aubrey.” He blinks once more. “How long…?”

“We’re almost there.”

Sunny readjusts his sitting position and sweeps a glance across the bus interior. “Oh. So we are.”

“Yeah.”

“Mhm.”

They don’t talk the rest of the way, but that’s alright. They’ve said all they needed to say--or could say, given the circumstances.

* * *

She kisses his cheek with cold, dry lips the bus stop before his. It catches him so much by surprise that he forgets how it feels as soon as it's over, but for a fiery ache of wanting more. His words become stuck in his throat--but it’s not right, none of it is right, because she’s standing as the bus grinds to a halt, her hair drawing past his face like tendrils of alien plant matter when she raises her head.

“My stop.”

“Aren’t you… can’t you stay till mine?”

“And you’ll ask me to have lunch with you.”

Well, yeah. She’s not wrong. And after that, to walk around the city with him, and after that, dinner, and then… “And you can always say no.”

Her lips press themselves into a penitent line. “That’s what I’m doing. This is my stop, Sun.”

“But you… could I have your number?” Under his fingers, the bus seat armrest threatens to rupture. 

“Don’t have a data plan, in case they track me down. Not like there’s anyone out there trying to track me down, but… better safe than sorry, no?”

“Then… “ 

She hoists the duffel bag onto her shoulder, prying her hair from beneath its straps. “I’ll find you if I need to.”

“You have my number though, right?”

“Yeah. But don’t expect any calls anytime soon.”

And that was that. They roll into a small station surrounded by chain-link fences and smog. The bus screeches as it lowers itself to the floor like a raptor after a long flight. The placid smile on Aubrey’s face wobbles.

She takes his hand in hers again, holds it and seems to weigh it. “Um…” Deliberating, she sucks her teeth, glancing every direction except for his. “About…”

“About what?”

“...Nothing.” The poignant smile returns; it’s gracious and unfitting for her large-eyed, gamine face, as if stolen from a mink-coated woman at a funeral for someone she’s never met. “This is bye, I guess.”

She slides his hand off hers, gently, into his lap and gives it a final little pat. 

There’s nothing he can do to make her stay, and it’s not like he’ll try, either. He might as well die of embarrassment if she says no to his desperate begs, but if she says yes… something else will decay and it will not be so easily repaired as his dignity.

He can’t harbor this fugitive forever. So he swallows the Slurpee promise for another day, decides not to remind her. He watches her turn back from the sparse queue of passengers exiting the vehicle and wave delicately. After she turns back around, she doesn’t turn back again, her face injected with that same apocalyptic, serene smile. She doesn’t even stop to watch the bus carry him away into the city center, just shrugs her slipping duffel bag back up her shoulder and skips off down a sidewalk into the parking lot of a nearby apartment complex.

At his stop, he hugs his mother for a long time. She smells like office air-conditioning with a hint of lilies and it almost makes him cry. Her eyes are very old and very tired, but they are filled with love beyond anything he can comprehend. He buries his face in her shoulder.

“Oh, what’s wrong?” she murmurs. 

“Nothing. Just missed you is all.”

There’s a good chance he’ll never see Aubrey again, but no, that isn’t true. He’ll find her, somehow, when he needs her. The city can only camouflage someone as bright and vast as her for so long. 

Well, not when, but if. In the crisscrossing mad bustle of the bus-metro-taxicab conglomerate station, he feels a strange sort of liberation. He’s never liked crowds, but only because he’s never been so belonging in one as he is now. Here, he’s shapeless and ever-clamoring--but indistinctly, like a sparrow among its flock in the dusk. Whatever pursues him will lose him among the thousands of other restless hunted in this city. 

* * *

Aubrey walks out into her dominion like a lion released from captivity into the Serengeti savannah. A lion that’s been birthed and raised within a zoo, that is. Packless, preyless, with nothing to guide her but a small map she pilfered from the bus station.

The sky is thick with clouds, trapping the city’s infernal heat underneath its cover. There’s no north wind to lift the sweat away from her brow. She stands at a traffic intersection in a less-walked part of the city and hits the crosswalk button, watching cars blast pass, filling her lungs with exhaust. Somewhere, a hound barks. Somewhere, an ambulance hurtles to its destination. 

Kim had planned to move into the city as well. “It’s where it happens,” she’d said. Where what happened, she didn’t know, but she knew it happened here. Absorbing the chaos, Aubrey concedes. So much is happening. People are dying, being born, laughing, bemoaning, sleeping, crying, shaking with emotion. Faraway is a ghost town compared to this place. 

First order of business is finding a place to stay as she amasses enough cash to buy a tent (if she enjoys vagabonding) or rent nights at the hostel (if she doesn’t). Maybe she could find a halfway house or church or somewhere else warm to sleep. For a moment, she considers sleeping under the bridge with the nest of tents and shopping carts--but nah. Too many creepy old meth addicts.

She pops open her duffle bag and extracts her wallet.

Twenty-five bucks--the other twenty-five are in another duffle bag pocket. A bank card that she’d never used. And a fake ID she had gotten with Kim from some shady dude with half a beard and a throat like a gutter pipe behind a gas station. It looked passable then, but she had only ever had to use it when she bought booze that one time.

Prolly useful for getting employment and the boons that come with it, or something. 

All there’s to do is walk and ask, she supposes. With luck, someone’ll be looking for employment and she’ll find them before the sky darkens. On her map, gas stations glitter in orange bubbles with fuel insignias in almost an even distribution across the city grid. She traces a route with a finger to her nearest one, then the second nearest, then the third. 

By twilight, she had swept into three gas stations now and swept out, eyes trained on the shelves of candy bags by the magazine section long after she had exited the stores. Deli sandwich shops and bakeries too, she’d asked if they needed a spare dishwasher. No avail. She switches her duffel bag to her other shoulder and stretches the taut muscles of her free arm. Sky’s getting darker. But there’s nothing to do but keep going on.

The fourth gas station flaunts a “ **NOW HIRING, INQUIRE WITHIN** ” sign in the front window, to her delight. An electronic chime signals her entry, and a gas station employee with a face that bore significance to a duck in a way that Aubrey can’t place her finger on briefly glances up from his phone.

“Can I help you?” he said, as she padded up to the counter. Ennui mars his waterfowl features. No, he doesn’t physically resemble a duck in an obvious way… but… it is there. A hint of duck. A suggestion.

“Saw your sign.” She jabs a thumb at the sign behind her and speaks in her most adult voice. “The position still open?”

“Yeah. Hold on,” turning. “Dareesh! We got one up for the spot,” he yells.

“Jesus, you’re killing my eardrums. I might have her replace you.” Dareesh appears from the back room with a laptop cradled in his thick arm. “Miss, come sit in my office.” 

Dareesh the slightly rotund Indian man is only taller than her by a few inches and sports an amiable face atop a neck the color and consistency of a melted chocolate bar. She follows him into the back where he sits at a plastic folding desk with his laptop. 

“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing to the folded plastic chair leaning by the wall.

“Budget cuts?” Aubrey struggles to pry the chair open. Her face simmers slightly.

“You’re talking.” Dareesh chuckles, gives her a once-over and no doubt tags her as one of those wandering youth who have recently realized they can only wander so long before they run dry. She curls her hands in her lap, suddenly self-conscious of the chipped black nail polish. “Let’s start with the basics. Do you have an ID?”

She hands it over, and Dareesh takes it, nodding, entering the data into his laptop.

“Have you ever worked at a gas station before?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Do you have experience with day-to-day responsibilities like stocking the shelves and putting money in the register?”

“I’ve stocked shelves. Yeah.” For a charity thing. 

Dareesh taps away again. “Have you been employed before?”

“No. Figured this is as good a place to start.”

“Any drugs or criminal history?”

“No. Never. None.” Aubrey said. She folds her hands the other way around and crosses her ankles. Technically, this is the truth, but Aubrey herself concedes that she should have been arrested at least once or twice--she doesn’t know what superhuman lubricant lets her wriggle out of things so easily; call it luck, maybe? Not like she believes in this stuff, but coincidence sure smiles kindly upon her.

“Alright, you got the job. Be here by noon tomorrow. I’ll get Tim to teach you the ropes.” He reaches out for a handshake. “Dareesh.”

His hand is warm and soft. “Aubrey.”

She didn’t expect it to be that easy, but it was. Coincidence, again, is on her side. That, and tenacity. There’s no god she believes in quite as much as she believes in the toughness of a human soul. She mutters a thank-you prayer to no one in particular as she strides into the shop again, Tim the Duck giving her a cursory nod.

On her way out of the store something reminds her of a deal she made. She forces her attention on the other sounds of this compact little shop of late-night cravings--the neon Heineken sign by the cooler emits a hum like the rubbed edge of a crystal glass; Tim the Duck’s overgrown nails tap against his phone screen; the door jingles; traffic tumbles and crashes; the scream of warring crows pierces across the parking lot; and by and by the city ambience swarms upon and consumes, in the back of the shop, the soft, persistent churn of a Slurpee machine.

It might as well be silent. That’s the way she likes it, she decides.

It’s dark out by now. Like giant spotlights shining upon exhibits of often nothing, sometimes a bristly dandelion, the streetlights illuminate weed-conquered sidewalks, stronger than they are in Faraway--the weeds, yes, but the lamps also. She sticks a hand in the glow, half-expecting it to scald her. This city seems perpetually shrouded in either dawn or twilight. The only indicator of time is the color of the border on the top floors of the skyscrapers around her: neon orange when it is actually dawn or twilight, white during other times. Heat lifts off the asphalt around her.

She wanders, considering her lodging options, and lets her feet take her into a small wooded park--no, too secluded. Then past that, a metro entrance--but she’s claustrophobic. Across the street, she spots a bridge fording a small creek with its underside hidden enough that she wouldn’t be bothered, but with no sign of other vagabonds already claiming the spot. 

The creek itself runs fast enough to deter mosquitoes and mayflies from breeding in its waters, but, brushing past leaves and flattening the earth to make way for her sleeping spot, she finds herself slapping at insects she can’t see but can feel alight on her arm hairs.

The first night’s always the worst. Better get used to it, she thinks to herself, burying her face in her hands and letting herself weep the pressures of the day away. And then she’s over it. She brushes the wetness from her cheeks and wraps the fleece blanket around herself. It’s summer, but the night cools considerably, and she brings her knees to her chest. She retrieves the photo of her and Kim as well, them smiling with sugar buzz in spring sunshine after a weekly candy-shop raid. To Kim’s mother’s despair, she keeps an identical photo by her bedside as well.   
  
In the shadows under the bridge, she can barely make out their two faces, but having the photo in her hand, a such clean representation of her connection to the world back home, helps her feel a little less stranded. 

She folds the photo and slips it into her wallet. Tomorrow, her phone alarm will ring in the morning and she’ll have to stretch her legs in the warming morning, hopefully without a face dotted with bug bites. But for now, she removes her bat and tucks the bag underneath her head. She’s got nothing to do but rest. And it’s actually quite nice, with the burbling of the creek and the dialogue of crickets and frogs, like a camping trip without the tent... or, well, any way to return to normal housed life. Fucked up camping.

But something’s still not right. The rushing water will drown the sound of any approaching footsteps, giving her no time to awaken and flee.

She holds the bat to her body, places it under the bag with her fingers in a vice grip on the handle. There. This is the best she can do.

Something’s still not right, and it’s got something to do with the desire of a second photo, with different people in it. Maybe she should have thieved a photo or two from Basil’s album? God knows she needs it more than he does. But there’s nothing she can do about that. She tries, with monumental effort, to banish the thought of one day forgetting their faces from her mind. His face.

And then, in a way much less like proper falling asleep and more like having her consciousness drip out of her head, bit by bit, Aubrey succumbs to the night, watching the streetlights dim and the world’s shadows fade with lethargic content.

* * *

Several blocks away, but not as many as either of them expect, a thin boy stands on a balcony and runs a hand through his hair. It comes away slightly damp. The night’s cool, but he’s wearing a sweater vest. 

“Do you see this?” His mother calls from her nestled position on the couch, flicking through TV channels, probably seeing nothing through her yawns. A new slipper hangs from the tip of her foot. “The cable’s a disappointment here. I might have to cancel our package. Ah, that’s a phone call for tomorrow.”

“Feel free.” 

She stretches and smiles. “Mmh. Glad this is all over with, though. I never want to move again.”

“Me neither.”

A pause. “Do you like the view?” 

Sunny looks downward. It’s a three-story drop to the pavement. “It… it’s alright.” 

“I was also thinking of growing something on the balcony, maybe one of those ferny plants… “ snapping her fingers noiselessly, “what are they called? The nursery gives them all these pretty names but I can’t remember any of them. You had a friend who liked plants, I remember…”

“Basil.”

“Ah, yes. Yes.” Her voice turns dark. “Him.”

“Mhm.” 

“But, ah. Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought him up--you must be sensitive about it still. You’ll make better friends here, dear. I promise. Maybe someone like Hero. Hero’s a good kid. His parents must be very proud of him.”

He says nothing, just grips the balcony railing tight in case the ground tilts and dumps him into the street. 

“But all that’s behind us, now. Aren’t you glad we left that all behind?” She chuckles--clucks--in the way moms do when they’re either tipsy or sleepy. “I am.”

Sunny eyes the three-story drop again and wonders whether it would hit someone exiting the building square on the head if he puked. Somewhere in the city is Aubrey, maybe not even surviving her first night out here, maybe kidnapped or robbed, or maybe run over by lawless urban traffic. All because he couldn’t leave her behind.

It’s a beautiful view, really. The world glitters before him like frozen fireflies. Somewhere, a local band plays a bar gig--he can hear the faintest hints of whoops and laughter. It’s all ambiguity and mixed scents, mixed sounds, mixed light here. He doesn’t know what he’s smelling but it smells good, and the noises around him blend into an odd harmony. 

A dark-haired, light-eyed girl who wasn’t Aubrey smiled at him on the metro home today. He’d looked away until she got off at her stop, and later cursed the fact that he took note of her stop and the time of his trip. But it isn’t an entirely unpleasant memory to recall, because maybe, maybe, there is hope for him yet? 

And that afternoon he looked into the pristine bathroom mirror and saw nothing but his small, pale form: ghostlike, but not a ghost. No ghosts.

And he’s enjoying himself now by doing nothing but standing around despite his stomach turning--but that too is a good sign, because at least he can feel nausea now, and not just… disconnect? It doesn’t matter now.

So what if she wants nothing to do with him now? She’ll be alright, anyhow. Aubrey’s always been the kind of girl to turn out alright, even if a little beat up. Not like it matters--she meant that goodbye and he knows it because it came with a confession too smooth, too calm, to signify anything but the end of something that could have been, in another life. He doesn’t remember what the kiss on his cheek felt like but he does remember that it made him so afraid, for an inexplicable reason, that she was going to die.

“Sunny?”

He readjusts his eyepatch. Turning back into the warmth of the home, he smiles. “Yeah. This has been a long time coming."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey all- update as of 20/02/2021
> 
> cicada has gifted the writing of CTPSB to me due to some external factors, working alone will be a bit harder and the chapters will take longer to write.
> 
> I cannot promise you the same amount of quality that we had while working together but I can promise a full and complete story. I will not let CTPSB die easily. 
> 
> that being said, if you have any experience in proofreading/editing, PLEASE contact me @Danlabs#0386! I would love and appreciate all the help I can get.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for taking a PEEK. gimme comment. gimme kudo if u enjoyed, find me at cicada#5279 and dan at uhh Danlabs#0386. here is a treat for ur continued support and literacy. [tw monkey.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apPsjYs6HmE)


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